Tag Archives: NAFTA

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size… That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?

It wasn’t the first such postal advertisement I’d received though perhaps the first I’d given more than a cursory glare and the standard rant of expletives. Was it the recent flood of ads from this industrial mammoth that gave me pause? The obscene sums of money dumped into a campaign of such obvious deception? Maybe the gnawing fear that such schemes must have their effects… or why bother? Continue reading →

For any of you who have had the great fortune never to have played the game Risk, know that it’s a game of hostile takeover—a war game, though it’s not a reach to make it analogous to corporate takeover, which, let’s be honest, that’s what most war is. And without a doubt, Risk is about my least favorite game… EVER! But as elder son (I’ll call him C1) is just in from a couple months in D.C. and on his way out again in a couple weeks, my own game preferences were recently overruled. Continue reading →